Monty Python legend Terry Jones tells Nathan Bevan his true feelings about his comedy legacy, growing up in Wales and why that long hoped-for Flying Circus reunion might still happen – sort of

Monty Python legend Terry Jones tells Nathan Bevan his true feelings about his comedy legacy, growing up in Wales and why that long hoped-for Flying Circus reunion might still happen – sort of

CAN you ring me back? I really have to pee,” laughs Terry Jones. Those are the very first words my lifelong Monty Python idol says to me.

And while they might be more than a little unexpected, they are also, I’m sure you’ll agree, going to be pretty hard to forget.

However, 10 minutes later, he’s back on the phone in his North London home and, despite sounding rather full of the sniffles, is quick to laugh and more than happy to talk.

The main reason I’m ringing is to discuss Jones’ contribution to the recent World Book Day for which he’s one of 10 famous names who’ve penned short, fast-paced books aimed at getting more adults reading.

But that doesn’t stop me from blurting out how that now infamous poster of him sitting naked at an organ hung on the wall of my student digs for years, or him from waxing lyrical on everything from his Colwyn Bay childhood, Python’s legacy and exactly why the only US showing of his “delightful” film version of The Wind In The Willows’ ended up being a seedy porn cinema in Times Square.

But first, something completely different – the new book.

“It’s called Trouble On The Heath and I jumped at the challenge of writing a quick read, short story,” said the 68-year-old.

“Plus there were all sorts of rules to follow like never having more than one three syllable word in the same sentence. I had to keep it simple.”

Much simpler it seems than the plight of the book’s protagonist, a mild-mannered professor of history called Martin Thomas who winds up becoming embroiled with the Russian mafia after objecting to some building work blotting out one of his favourite views.

“I based the whole thing around what’s happening in my road in Highgate, North London.

“All totally exaggerated, of course, just in case the neighbours get worried they might appear in there somewhere,” chuckles Jones.

“But we do get a lot of Russians buying round here because the old Embassy used to be just round the corner. And they just build and build and build.”

It’s a million miles away from the undulating North Wales landscape of Old Colwyn where Jones grew up.

“Oh yes, opposite our house were these fields that just seemed to go on and on forever,” he sighs.

“Even though my dad’s bank work took us to live in Surrey when I was four and a half I still have very vivid memories of that time.

“Probably the most striking was meeting my dad for the very first time on the platform of Colwyn Bay train station as he returned from his RAF posting in India during WWII.

“I can remember walking up the stairwell to the concourse and on the rise of every step there was a blue enamel sign advertising destinations like Lulworth Cove in Dorset or Brighton – real exotica,” laughs Jones, who became a father himself for the third time in 2009 with Anna Soderstrom, a 28-year-old Swedish Oxford graduate he’d originally met at a book signing.

“The train pulled in and all these people were getting off and my mum was getting more and more anxious because dad wasn’t there.

“But then, through plumes of steam at the end of the platform, he appeared – this lone figure in a forage cap and holding a kit bag.

“He ran over and kissed my mum, then my brother then bent down and picked me up and planted one right on me.

“I’d only ever been kissed by the smooth lips of a lady up until that point, so his bristly moustache was quite disturbing!”

The war looms large in many of Jones’ recollections of his Welsh childhood.

“There’d be tanks going up the road outside and I can vividly remember being woken from my bed aged about two, my grandmother pulling back the curtains and showing me these search lights shooting up into the night sky to celebrate VE Day – things like that really stay with you.”

Some things, however, he wished wouldn’t.

“It seems silly but I can’t forget being in my pram and my mum having bought this alabaster bust of a shepherdess or some such thing,” Jones winces.

“For some reason I got very cross about this lady’s face suddenly turning up next to me, so I picked up this pot of marmalade and banged the bust with it and chipped off the nose.

“I suppose I was just trying to defend mum from this strange intruder, but instead of being grateful she was absolutely furious!”

Jones adds that he hated being dragged away from home when his dad’s job relocated them all to the affluent commuter belt of Claygate.

“I couldn’t bear it and for the longest time I wanted Wales back,” he says.

“Even today I still feel very Welsh and feel it’s where I should be really.

“I still have a photo of me, aged three, sticking out my tongue and making sandcastles with a wooden spoon on the beach there – more sand piles than castles really – with all these old men in suits and flat caps sitting on deck chairs in the background.

“God, it seems like a world away now.”

Knowing he’d been given the key to the town by Colwyn’s mayor back in 2008, I tell him how growly US singer Tom Waits, upon receiving a similar award while on stage in Texas, told his audience: “So if you come home to find me in your living room wearing just my underpants, then I trust we have an understanding?”

“I suppose if I could do anything I’d renovate the pier there, I just can’t understand why anyone would let it go to wrack and ruin like that. It’s such a shortsighted thing to do.

“My grandparents ran the local Amateur Operatic Society and staged Gilbert and Sullivan concerts there every year and it’s one of the few Victorian piers left around our coastline.

“And this one is still saveable – just.

“I get so sad to think my home town has had to have EU handouts because it’s one of the most deprived areas in the country.

“And to think, we once looked down on the people of Llandudno,” he laughs.

A patron of Theatr Colwyn, Jones was also awarded with a commemorative blue plaque to go up on the front of the house he grew up in.

“All of which was very nice, but I was told they can’t put it up until after I’m dead.

“It’s sitting right in front of me as we speak,” he adds, bending to lift the plaque from its resting place nearby.

“The date of my final day on this Earth hasn’t been filled in, it just says “Terry Jones 1942 – ? It’s a bit sobering that.”

The mood suitably darkened, I decide to ask Jones if he’d thought of what he like to have on his headstone.

“Hmm, let’s see,” he says, slowly warming to the idea.

“Maybe a description of me as a writer of children’s books (Jones is an award-nominated kids’ writer) or some of my academic stuff (he’s also a published keen historian) – maybe as the man who restored Richard II’s reputation.

“He was a terrible victim of 14the century political spin, you know.

“I think those are my best bits.”

What, no mouse organ sketch, no lumberjack song, no ministry of silly walks or upper class twit of the year? What, no Python?

“To tell you the truth, it’s such a big surprise to me that we’re still talking about those days, what, 40-odd years later?” he says flatly.

“The thing is we never thought Python was a success when it was actually happening, it was only with the benefit of hindsight.

“The first few episodes of Flying Circus got absolutely no reaction whatsoever and every episode we’d be there biting our nails hoping someone might find it funny.”

Not surprising really, given the sort of audiences Beeb bosses bussed in to watch it being filmed.

“For the first episode, they got a lot of people from an old folks’ home who thought they were coming to see an actual circus. They were very bemused to say the least.

“And by the end of series one it was looking pretty touch and go that the BBC would decide to recommission it at all. It was only when they started receiving sackfuls of correspondence from school kids saying they loved it that we knew we were saved,” adds Jones, the then management at the Beeb having decried the whole thing – as a recent Freedom Of Information document revealed – as being ‘in the most appalling taste’.

“I mean, even right up until the middle of the second series John Cleese’s mum was still sending him job adverts for supermarket managers cut out from her local newspaper.

“So yes, it was all terribly glamorous,” he laughs.

“I can’t quite understand how we supposedly influenced all these comedians around today because I can remember going through our scripts at the time and thinking, ‘'Well, it’s not quite the Goons is it? If only we had more characters and more stories’.”

“Oh God, The Holy Grail was a disaster when we first showed it,” says Jones, who co-directed along with his Python’s other Terry, one Mr Gilliam.

“The audiences would laugh for the first five minutes and then silence, nothing.

“So we re-cut it and re-cut it and took out things like wind noises and the rustle of clothes because we thought they might be drowning out the comic pauses.

“Then we’d show it in different cities, saying, ‘We’re worried about our film, would you come an look at it?’

“And as a result people would come and they'd all be terribly worried about it too, so it was a nightmare!

“But it wasn’t until we played it at a film festival in LA to our first proper paying crowd that we got laughs, probably because we got there late and didn’t have time to tell anyone how on edge we were about it all.”

Life Of Brian , which came along four years later in 1979, would prove to be no less of a headache, whipping up fierce criticism from religious quarters as mocking Christianity.

“We always stated Brian wasn’t blasphemous, but heretical,” snorts Jones, whose colleagues Michael Palin and John Cleese bizarrely found themselves arguing all things ecumenical on a heated TV chat show debate with the then Bishop of Southwark.

“It wasn’t about what Christ was saying, but about the people who followed Him – the ones who for the next 2,000 years would torture and kill each other because they couldn’t agree on what He was saying about peace and love.

“It’s extremely relevant today too, given what’s on in the Middle East, but at the time it didn’t feel scandalous.

“It felt a bit like kicking a dead donkey because no-one was going to church then. I mean, attendances were really down to almost zero.

“These days, of course, religion is a topical hot potato again, so I don’t think our little satire had that much effect really.”

Unless you happened to live in Aberystwyth that is, where the film remained banned until 30 years later when, in an odd twist, the town’s mayor Sue Jones-Davies (who’d actually played Brian’s Welsh girlfriend in the film) arranged for it to be shown in a one-off charity screening in aid of the British Heart Foundation.

“Sue’s a lovely lady and her ending up as mayor in the one place where the film had never been seen, well you couldn’t make it up, could you?” chuckles Jones.

“It was great fun going back there and I’m very glad Mike P (Palin) came with me, he didn’t have to do that.”

And if you thought Terry Gilliam was the only Python-cum-director who got the rough end in Hollywood – the eccentric US animator’s own movies having met with constant studio interference – then think again.

“So the resulting lack of takings here meant the States didn’t really bother with it,” adds Jones, who donned a fat suit and green face for the lead role of Mr Toad.

“Disney had always been reluctant to do much with it, they didn’t get idea of live action cartoon and wanted to put it straight out on video.

“I was doing a documentary in New York at the time and remember getting a phone call saying my film was actually playing at a cinema in Times Square.

“So I rushed down there only to discover it was showing at one of those seedy little porno theatres,” he splutters.

“Nevertheless I shot off to buy an instant camera just so I could get a photo of its name up in lights on the awning outside, but by the time I got back they’d taken it down again.

“That’s how long it ran for,” howls Jones, whose movie had been re-christened Mr Toad’s Wild Ride Across The Pond.

“Maybe with a title like that the dirty mac brigade thought they were getting a very different film altogether!

“I did get some vindication though in the fact the New York Times gave it the best review of all my films and Variety launched a campaign asking why the studios were trying to sink this wonderful film.

“But it really upset me very much at the time,” he says.

Is that why it’s taken him until now, some 15 years later, to properly direct again?

“Maybe, yes,” shrugs Jones, who’s been mooted to direct a new sci-fi comedy Absolutely Anything later this year.

“The same company that just did (Oscar winning film) Black Swan has picked it up and hopefully we can get the money to do it.

“It’s about a man who gets magical powers, but nothing ever works the way he intends it to, and so far Robin Williams has expressed an interest in voicing the part of Denis the talking dog,” he adds.

However, the most online excitement has been generated by Jones’ plans to bring together his former comedy partners to play a group of aliens – news which, no matter how you dress it up, will be greeted by fans as marking the first real Python reunion in 27 years.

“They’ve all agreed to do it so far, apart from Eric (Idle), as long as they can fit it into their schedules,” chirps Jones.

“Don’t forget though, we managed to get every one apart from Terry G (Gilliam) in Wind In The Willows.”

Oh Terry, don’t spoil it!

“Sorry,” he laughs. “But the reunion question comes up quite a lot, even now.”

Was it a case of the old gang not wanting to work again after Graham Chapman died? (The funnyman having succumbed to throat cancer in 1989 and his ashes scattered on the top of Snowdon).

“Well, we’d done the fourth and last series of Flying Circus without Cleese and knew we could still be pretty funny, even without all of us involved” adds Jones, himself a recent cancer survivor.

“But Graham going was like the spark of Python going out, to be truthful. We kind of guessed at that point that there wouldn’t be anything else.

“Although now, I really think we all just get on far too well and that any edge we once had is long gone.”

So, to paraphrase a certain famous sketch about a dead parrot, the Python reunion rumour has passed on, is no more, it has ceased to be, expired and gone to meet its maker.

Bereft of life, kicked the bucket, it has shuffled off its mortal coil and run down the curtain to join the bleedin’ choir invisible. It is AN EX-RUMOUR!

“Well...” Jones ahh-ums, unable to resist one final tease.

“We’re still known to meet together for lunch sometimes...”

Trouble On The Heath by Terry Jones is out now, priced £1.99. For more information, visit www.quickreads.org.uk

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